School of Meditation Weekly Teachings

St Paul is often credited with founding Christianity. Certainly it would not have developed as it did without him. Nor would he have developed it as he did, if he had not been thrown from his horse on the road to Damascus and in a blinding light had seen Jesus and had his life utterly changed.

Last week we saw that mystical consciousness is as old as the hills. Most of the great scientists of our own age also came to see the world this way – unitively and reverentially. The roots of what we call the Christian mystical tradition, therefore, predate the historical Jesus.

Learning to meditate and learning what meditation has to teach us are both different kinds of learning from what we are used to. We are not learning anything ‘new’ in our usual understanding of novelty. We are relearning something known in childhood and lost before we could maturely integrate it .

It takes courage to leave our thoughts, our ‘ego’ behind, to leave the comfort of our conditioning, to let go – however temporarily - of our sense of identity and individuality that we have shaped out of our thoughts. But it is essential “to leave self behind” to follow Jesus into the Silence and discover, who we truly are, a child of God.

As we have seen meditation leads us to a greater awareness of our conditioning and hence to self-knowledge and ultimately freedom. One helpful way of entering the silence is to remember that all our thoughts are thoughts about the past or the future.